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Saturday, June 3, 2017

The Half Shaman in Space: The Ark Ship and the Entity

A rough sketch of the interlocked spaceships. The Ark Ship is a torus, or more popularly, a doughnut. The shuttle that Jeb and her people came on is at the rightmost apex of the mysterious tetrahedron-shaped starship.

Two short scenes, the latter marking the intersection of Jeb's and the entity's lives.

My clothes re-appear. I dress faster than fast.

Then the sensori-matting is restored. The doors too, though they stay shut even when I back up against them.

I look up. Something is happening on the back wall. A small blue light races over the surface of the wall outlining a … my heart nearly bursts out of me with excitement … the shuttle we came in! I run there.

The outlined shuttle glides toward a scramble of lines that in no way resembles the doughnut-shaped Ark Ship I learned about in Shaman School. But why do I expect that? Any of the places where I’ve been so far, don't call to mind anything I learned about the interior of the Ark Ship, except that the small outlined ship is definitely our shuttle.

It stops in front of me. I’m blinking tears away as I trace my call sign on it, ZA.

The letters vibrate. The Ark Ship knows me. Now I do cry. No blood is needed.

The blue light splits. One bit continues to outline the shuttle and the other flits to the mess of lines, where it starts to outline a doughnut-shaped ring surrounding a double pyramid shape. The ring could be the Ark Ship. The pyramids, I don’t know. How they came to be melded, I don’t know that either.

I trace AZ on the ring. The blue light takes over and retraces the letters several times very fast. I guessed right.

The blue point goes on to show me where the Ark Ship’s docking ports are. In Shaman School I learned that a shuttle would be able to dock at any one of the four ports on the inside of the ring.

The little light shows me that all these ports are covered by the pursed-mouth-like corners of the joined pyramid shapes that are wedged? Contained? in the centre of the Ark Ship’s doughnut.

Now the little blue light races really fast over the diagram, lighting up new lines and fading out old lines, making it so that the design seems to turn over like a dumpling so that I can see that the second identical pyramid sticks out from the other side of the hole in the doughnut-like ship.

What it all looks like to me is two pyramids stuck together at their bases wedged in the Ark Ship’s centre. The light racing round the shuttle’s outline and bringing it nearer, docks the shuttle on the top of the uppermost pyramid. A small version of the double pyramid shape is docked at the bottom point of the pyramid underneath. As if that small double pyramid is also a shuttle.

Alien if it is.

“Empty,” the entity says. “You are no fun at all.” Her voice is directed to toward the doors.

All the lines fade instantly. The little blue light extinguishes and I turn to face the centre of the room.

“I had you picked to be my special friend, we have so much in common,” says the entity.

Luckily the entity is still talking at the doors. I laugh from the relief that probably she didn’t see anything of the little blue light and its doings. It has given me a lot to think about.

I fire a bunch of questions at the entity to steer her attention away from where I was, while I walk to the place she’s speaking toward. “You are settler-born from Lotor? You were in prison? You are a half shaman? You are married to a man called Mongoose?” I ask her everything that I can think of that I am. “Your mother and father died of the Earth-born disease?”

“We are practically the same age,” she says.

She might have been near to the the-age-I-am-now just before her pattern was taken, but to my calculations, she’s now hundreds of years older than I am. Though she doesn’t appear to have matured.

The entity continues. “We’re both girls. I used to be as different from the rest of my people as you are from yours. I was in a prison, it was called the Tween House. I am Earth-born if you mean being born on the only planet in the Universe called Earth”

I don’t know enough about Earth to know whether it sounds true. I decide on a snippy tone. People being snipped at by other people often give more information. “So you’re an Earth-born. Don’t know how you got away from Lotor?”